How to determine usage level of custom accounts

Situation: I have created custom accounts for a number of the IT managers and technicians in our state agency. These custom accounts are based upon their Microsoft Active Directory credentials so they are automatically granted access to their custom views when they connect to the URL of our load-balanced web servers. However, I have no idea which individuals are actually using these custom accounts to view network performance information relevant to their interests.

As a member of the central IT group, I would like to be able to report on how successful we have been in providing field IT staff with access to relevant network availability and performance information.

Question: Is there a log file or other resource that I can look at to determine which custom accounts are being used, and how often they are actually consulting the custom views that I have built for them?

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account

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Accepted answers

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Karlo.Zatylny

Hi,

In the Accounts table of Orion we track the LastLogin time for all the user accounts. You could create a custom report that looked at this value for each of the accounts to tell you when the last time they logged in was.

We do not track account history though, so each time you ran this, it would be a snapshot of that point in time.

Does this answer your question?

Thanks

MelloDL

The information available from the "LastLogin time" field in the accounts table is better than nothing. But as Karlo wrote, it is merely a "snapshot" in time.

It would be wonderful if Solarwinds could develop a feature (or automated means of sending the data to an external resource) that could retain and summarize the frequency and duration of custom account usage. I suspect that we could redirect these AD-based account access attempts to our Cisco ACS (Radius) server to capture this authentication-related information for accounting purposes but I would prefer not implementing such a convoluted process.

We are attempting to offer this as a service of the central IT shop for the benefit of our field support staff.

Managers and executives would like to have metrics to judge whether this is a service that is actually used and of benefit considering the time and effort required for creation of custom accounts and custom views.